Hermione, Hero
by flax
Summary: In an alternate universe, Hermione is not getting parades for having saved the wizarding world. One chapter only.


_All_ _things from the universe of Harry Potter belong to J. K. Rowlings. I am grateful to be able to play with her characters. I am making no profits._

_This story takes place in an alternate universe, different from where canon Harry Potter presumably will go. This story follows on a presumed defeat of Harry Potter by Voldemort, which is then followed by the defeat of Voldemort and the death eaters, by Hermione. This is an aftermath of sorts._

Hermione knew something was up, but she had trained herself years back to not act like she cared. She hid behind so many layers of not caring that she felt nothing. Grime caked on her feet, and she did not care. Her hair grew in knots, and she did not care. Her body was no longer her concern. And then they did something cruel.

Hermione was cleaned again, by the grey prison guards, a portkey strapped to her hand. And she was wrenched into a new prison cell. Rock, still. Bars, still. A corridor of rock, still. But up on the wall, something was different. A window. This prison cell had a window. Hermione though did not care. Not caring was thick on her soul √ but still, somehow, light and sky were invited in.

Days passed. Hermione was spelled into eating, as she had been for years. She was used to being spelled, and did not care anymore. But something did change. For the first time in nearly 8 years, she made a conscious choice. When she was sent to bed, she aimed herself to see that window. When she woke, she looked for the light from that window. She could watch it run across the rocks of her cell, and think of words to describe the touch, tender, turning the rock of her prison into the innocent rocks of the earth, here, and touched by sun, even here. A finger of sunlight.

Draco Malfoy, now vice minister of the reconstruction, had taken over the holding of the Great Assassin while the prison for the most dangerous was reworked. He hadn't taken on all the prisoners, but he was in charge, and made appropriate arrangements for each. And here, in his manor, he had the rock prison room, and there he kept the assassin who made it all possible, waiting for the day she noticed that the door was not locked.

Weeks passed. The prisoner never looked at who was spelling her. The prisoner didn't notice the unlocked door. The prisoner did not notice the open door. The prisoner in time didn't seem to react even when her clothing was shifted from tunic to regular clothes. Draco could be patient, but he decided it was time. Months after she was in his home he tried to talk to her, but Hermione no longer noticed people talking to her.

The leading authorities, muggle and magic, had been quite clear when Draco had asked their opinions: Hermione wouldn't be able to take the shock of immediate freedom. They wanted her to resist the confinement, and then get her freedom from that resistance. Draco, ever careful, made sure no one remembered the conversations. While no one minded the Great Assassin be less punished, they were not going to come out and support her service to the community.

Frankly, to allow the death eaters to win, to rain down pain and evil for a pair of horrific months, and then to wipe out their inner circle, while not anyone's plan, had worked out best for everyone still alive. Those alive were willing to back down and make deals. However, no one could support an assassin. She had killed the Minister of Magic. That Alfern Galding was a black hearted death eater made it understandable, but still not accepted. So the savior of the wizarding world, known as the Great Assassin, went to prison.

While she seemed oblivious to it, Draco, though, was not. He was troubled. The wizarding world owed her a debt, and while he couldn't pay the whole debt, he would do his part. This new beginning did not bode well based on the ongoing sacrifice of its mother. So, he got the prison system assigned to his department. So, he reviewed and decided to renovate some prisons. So, some prisoners had to be moved. So, Hermione was here.

And here she would stay. Far too much guilt for anyone to look for the mother of the new world in prison. So no one would look. But while she lived in a house that would arrange itself to her needs, she still sat in a stone room with a tiny window too high for her to touch. Hermione herself maintained these walls.

Draco decided to be the obnoxious wand bringing her a breakfast today. He relieved his butler and marched down.

He spelled in a table with the food. She never ate unless forced. In recent years they just cast nutrition spells on her. "Hermione Granger!" he cried out.

The mound of a person lay in the bed, doing nothing but watching the light on the wall. Draco had set aside the day, so he created an extra chair for his table, sat, and watched the light with her.

The light of the window crossed the room, like a clock, measuring the hours as it touched each rock slowly, with endless patience. Her eyes were open, and she saw this. She made no choices. She did nothing. She'd done nothing since wiping out the core of death eater power. But this, this window, she had wished for. One window, one daily play of light, slow. It had not rained at the manor since Hermione had moved in: her desire for this sun was real and never shifted.

She never ate. Draco thought about leaving her unfed, but they'd tried it before, and she would not rise even to feed herself. This had been done back in the prison before he had taken it over, and Hermione had nearly died. So he did not expect much here - but he did eat the meal at the table and when he was done, he performed the spell to feed the woman who lay in the cot. He performed the other spells that went with her daily regime, and then he did one more. He rearranged the castle around them, and let Hermione sit in a chair in the shade, under trees, upon a lawn which stretched wide and green. Beside them a wall had emerged, and Draco let it stay - if Hermione needed the wall now, he didn't mind a new wall here and there.

He actively held the spell for the morning, and then let it go at lunch. Hermione's desires reasserted, and she returned to her cell. But none the worse for wear.

For a month, Draco did this everyday. Every morning, Hermione spent a day out on a lawn. Sometimes it even drizzled and she sat inside a gazebo and was wrapped in a blanket. Sometimes it was sunny. Sometimes tiny fairies played a few feet off. After the month, Draco didn't have to suspend the mansion's spell to serve Hermione this time out of doors: she wanted this. One day a unicorn came to nuzzle the old friend. Another day, Chiron came and took tea while Hermione sat motionless, wrapped in a blanket. For her birthday, Draco took her to sit quietly at a bespelled, invisible seat in a muggle sporting event: perhaps seeing the muggle world returned to normal would make some sort of impression, regardless of whether football itself was an interest. She still returned to her cell every afternoon.

Hermione never said, and Draco never allowed anyone to ask, what it was that charmed her back into the world. But after a year of slow mornings, Hermione broke Draco's heart the day she reached out and took a cup of juice. He had never given up hope, but he had forgotten how much hope could blast a person, and it was as if lightning had hit. He didn't ask more, forcing himself to sit still, do nothing.

And she sipped. Her lips on a cup. Her eyes on the horizon. Her hand on the cup. Her fingers holding it. Then she put it back on the table, shakily.

A week after that she spoke.

"I thought you would be dead," she husked out, one morning, as Draco ate breakfast in her jail cell.

"I wasn't a death eater," he replied. "Come join me for breakfast," he then said.

She didn't reply.

On the lawn, they sat while Draco read a report and butterflies danced around a bush.

"I like roses," said Hermione.

Draco said nothing, but did look into the matter in his own way. The next day, there were dry, thorny stumps with dirt caked roots sitting on the lawn, and Draco stood there with a shovel. He dug, carefully putting the soil he dug out on a tarp. He then went and got a muggle devise, a "hose," and watered. Then he got the fertilizers, and then the fill. He made something that could have taken instants with his wand take hours as he dug and pushed, getting dirtier and dirtier. Sweaty, mud caked, hot, and with nothing to show but dead seeming branches prickling out of the otherwise smooth green lawn, he asked Hermione to inspect the job. She said nothing, and he returned inside, leaving her out. She herself, first time, did not pull herself back into her prison cell for the afternoon. She, in fact, slept that night in the gazebo, wrapped in a blanket.

Ronald came to visit. Ronald, as scarred in his own way, couldn't visit before. He sat there, the will as sucked out of him as it was out of her. "What happened?" she asked. Something in her was willing to talk.

"It worked out," was his impressive answer.

"And now?" she asked an hour later.

"We let it go," he said, giving the advice he could not take yet himself.

"Malfoy?" she asked.

"Your prison guard," said Ronald. Malfoy was listening, though he said he wouldn't, and he nearly reached through the listening device to strangle Weasley - for the suggestion of prisons. The trick for recovery was to get her to think of something else, according to various experts.

"He seems like a nanny," she said vaguely.

"He thinks that if you aren't somehow appeased, your curse will spread and eat all of the wizarding world."

"Curse?" she asked.

"He's got a theoretical point, but no proof. He thinks that since you recreated the rules of magic somehow when you took out the death eaters, making what they do impossible, that you are still tied to the ability to change what is magically possible for everyone."

"So what?" asked Hermione. "It was a one shot deal. I did the spell, then I did the act, and then it was over."

"Maybe," said Ron.

"Maybe?" asked Hermione.

"There's been an ongoing instability in magic: everything has been getting harder for everyone," said Ron. "The ability to will things is growing fainter and fainter. Draco thinks you are putting that limit on magic."

Hermione sat. "I see," she said, and then spoke no more that day.

The next day at breakfast, she turned to Draco and asked him if it would be so bad for people to do less magic.

"Yes," was his simple answer.

When time came to take her to the lawn, he did. And the rose bushes were beginning to leaf out. She looked at them with some annoyance. It was as if they were in slow motion. Draco laughed, and then took off his formal robes, standing in a white tunic and white trousers. Hermione tried to retreat to her prison cell, but the manor did not oblige her and she was stuck on the lawn.

"Silly," said Malfoy, and he morphed. A dragon the color of his hair stood there before here, his claws carefully sheathed and his wings playing in the wind. He stood up on his hind legs, extended his wings, held his head strait up and stretched his neck to the sky. The dragon howled with a sound Hermione had never heard before and hoped to never hear again, being somewhere between a scream and the horrifying winds that take down homes and trees. He then looked down at his house guest, returned his front paws to the ground and held out a foreleg for her to climb up. His house guest looked unwilling. Her knees melted and she sat ungainly upon the ground.

With his right paw, he picked up Hermione, who barely flailed, and put her on the back of his neck. Then he took off gently into the air, flying her through the mountains where he'd had a chance to be free as a child, where he'd had a chance to not be a death eater, where he'd had a chance to fall in love with the wind and the world. He flew coast lines; he flew empty stretches that Hermione couldn't place. By dinner they were in the land of Giants, and they took dinner in the home of one Snaarvi Gnudrd, and Hermione began to remember what was interesting in the wizarding world, in any world. It was involuntary, but she began to care.

When he returned her to the castle in the mountains, the damage was done: she had felt hope. The next morning, she was missing from her prison cell. The butler alerted Malfoy and the staff were frantic. Malfoy himself found her. He couldn't explain it, but he knew a fact when he looked at one: There was now a spring making a pool in the middle of his rose garden, and a frog that lived by a mound of rocks that bordered on the pool. Why Hermione choose to become a frog, Malfoy never knew. Nor did he tell beyond the three or four old friends of hers that had visited. Sometimes friendship could go where understanding could not.

finis


End file.
